As a latest injustice, Mother Nature sent Storm Windy to dash
our hopes of an early spring.

While we, bundled up and crowding around our space heaters,
forget what it was like to bask in the sun, the weather
professionals at ArabiaWeather have had a busy start to the year,
to say the least. But busy doesn’t have to mean chaotic, as is
apparent by the focused, analytic approach of Chief Product Officer
Yousef Wadi, obvious even over a Skype call.

ArabiaWeather’s products range from weather forecasting for
users throughout the region on desktop and mobile to specialized
packages for corporate customers like Royal Jordanian airlines and
Al Arabiya television station; they rely on a carefully balanced
system with five main inputs, says Wadi, that can predict weather
events up to a month in advance.

These include weather algorithms, or models, as
they’re called in the weather business, from the US, and
Europe and the UK, as well as open source algorithms they’ve
developed themselves that pertain specifically to the Middle East
“based on the learnings of our meteorologists around the region.”
These include algorithms that predict dust storms like the one that
engulfed the Levant last month that are a particularity of the
Middle East. The various models the team uses have been assigned
weights based on their individual records of accuracy.

The second input is data from
weather stations (pictured left), of which
ArabiaWeather has nearly 200 in the GCC and Levant, where
solar-powered sensors track wind speed, wind direction, volume of
rain, temperature, and other metrics. The team also gathers
information from weather stations in Saudi (which comprises their
major market share) whose information is publicly available, Wadi
says.

Third, the meteorological team culls raw images from the
company’s “massive” satellite coverage from
EUMETSAT,
a global satellite agency, on which the team then does its own
image processing. Next, they collect lightning strike
data region-wide, which “gives an indicator of the
intensity of the storm.”

If all this fails, the team relies on “human
intelligence,” meaning actual people stationed throughout
the region whom the team can call up and ask about the weather.

Because of the extremely precise and measured predictions of
both ArabiaWeather’s weather models and the know-how of its
meteorologists, the frequency of extreme weather events so far this
year haven’t fazed the team. In other words, there are always
potential extreme weather patterns on the horizon; it’s just that
this time, the potential extreme weather events actually
materialized in a way that was unusual for the region.

So how does the team translate the raw data to something its
customers can use?

Once the probability of an extreme weather pattern reaches a
certain level, the trick then becomes how to communicate the
weather patterns to users and clients. “The second a weather
pattern moves into a five-day signal, meteorologists and the
weather team look for errors,” and add a human corrective element
to algorithm predictions based on their own experience. “At this
point [in the weather cycle], human intelligence is better” than
algorithms, Wadi says.

Case in point: Storm Huda, the first extreme weather pattern in
the region this year, was originally predicted to be a “light
snow,” Wadi says. “Only Mohammed [al-Shaker,
ArabiaWeather’s founder and CEO] predicted heavy snow based on
what he's seen in past storms,” says Wadi. Huda (or Zina, as the
storm was named in Lebanon) went on to
wreak havoc with snow, rain, hail, and wind in Lebanon, Syria,
Jordan, Egypt, Palestine, and Saudi, and ArabiaWeather users were
properly warned.

Using the predictions compiled from algorithms and human
intelligence, the weather team takes over, writing articles (the
seven person editorial and weather content teams produce 24
articles per day), producing videos, and organizing mobile push and
email notifications to users of the Arabic language app who have
opted in. The teams are also invited to discuss the weather
forecast on regional television stations SkyNews Arabia and Al
Arabiya. ArabiaWeather’s product for its corporate clients is a bit
different, depending on each client’s reasons for needing to know
about the weather (we'll cover more of this in a subsequent
article).

While the team doesn’t release weather data for public
consumption more than two weeks in advance, Wadi gave us a tiny
scoop as to an extreme weather event that might
materialize somewhere in the Middle East. All I’ll say is: watch
out for March 7th.